As discussed in the ‘Sunrise on the Reaping: All We Know‘ post, the second Hunger Games prequel is almost unique among Collins’ offerings in that she has spelled out which political message inspired the work and the direction she chose to take the story in light of that point of origin. Per the People magazine article:
Along with unveiling the book’s cover, Collins teased what fans can expect in the new novel which follows her latest prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
“With Sunrise on the Reaping, I was inspired by David Hume’s idea of implicit submission and, in his words, ‘The easiness with which the many are governed by the few,’ ” she said, per the release.
“The story also lent itself to a deeper dive into the use of propaganda and the power of those who control the narrative,” she continued. “The question ‘Real or not real?’ seems more pressing to me every day.”
There are three take-aways there:
- Hume’s “idea of implicit submission” was her starting point, what “inspired” Sunrise,
- the story she wrote “lent itself,” which is to say ‘she chose to make it,’ a “deeper dive into the use of propaganda and the power of those who control the narrative,” and
- she tied it into her original series’ primary theme and with the world today by concluding, “The question ‘Real or not real?’ seems more pressing to me every day.”
Let’s go through these one at a time, starting with David Hume.
The David Hume work from which Collins is quoting is Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, and specifically from its Part 1, Essay IV, ‘Of the First Principles of Government.‘ Here is the opening paragraph of that work:
NOTHING appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of Egypt, or the emperor of Rome, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination: But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or prætorian bands, like men, by their opinion.
The ‘Online Library of Liberty‘ comments about this passage:
If Edmund Burke pondered over one of the key questions of political theory, “who guards us from the guardians?”, David Hume was pondering an equally difficult problem: “why is it so easy for the few in power to govern the many?” His answer was that “opinion”, or the beliefs the many hold about the legitimacy of those who rule, keeps the many from throwing off their rulers. This means that minimal force is required by the rulers to keep the many in line.
David Hume, 1711-1776, the greatest perhaps of the Scottish Enlightenment philosophes, is much more famous today, at least among academics, for his explicitly philosophical works and the profound epistemological skepticism to be found in them, a doubting of the human capacity to know, specifically with respect to causation, that is a foundation stone of modernity. I’d say his essays about religion and what can known about God, specifically his psychomachian Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, would be his next best remembered effort.
His thoughts about politics, however, though not much studied today outside of their influence on the Founding Fathers and their American experiment in republican democracy, are perhaps the most important. Collins quotes from one of the more obscure essays, but its most well known paragraph. Read the rest of ‘Of the First Principles of Government’ here for a introductory taste to Humean rhetoric and its follow-up in Essays, ‘On the Origin of Government‘ if you’re wanting to find more on “implicit submission” and how the elites control the many via “opinion.”
Frankly, there’s not much there and certainly nothing about propaganda as we understand the term. A passage in that second essay, though, points to a Collins touchstone, the tension between life as a human being and as a citizen of any polity, between, in Humean language, between Authority and Liberty:
In all governments, there is a perpetual intestine struggle, open or secret, between Authority and Liberty; and neither of them can ever absolutely prevail in the contest. A great sacrifice of liberty must necessarily be made in every government; yet even the authority, which confines liberty, can never, and perhaps ought never, in any constitution, to become quite entire and uncontroulable.
For Collins’ explicit comments on this subject, see the Acknowledgements page at the back of Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes:
I’d like to thank my parents for their love and for always supporting my writing: my dad, for teaching me about the Enlightenment thinkers and the state of nature debate from an early age; and my mom, the English major, for nurturing the reader in me and for all those happy hours around the piano. [Emphasis added]
As I wrote about this in my first post about Ballad:
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a treatise in story about whether man is by nature evil or innocent and whether the state is necessary to prevent great injustice and arbitrary violence being the rule of human group existence or whether the state is the agency of the greatest injustices and systematized violence. What Collins did in The Hunger Games with respect to war, both its necessity and its inevitably great price in human death and mental illness, she explores in this prequel about the balance of Human Being and Citizen.
Collins is a big game hunter, believe me, and she bags her beast again, I think, in a morality tale that is nothing like a one-sided Jeremiad or partisan Philippic. Readers of Locke and Rousseau and students of American history and current events are going to have a lot to chew on here because Collins does not give you easy answers to the big question involved.
Ballad, you’ll recall, opens with five epigraphs, three from the Enlightenment thinkers Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, each about the need for authority and about the consequential loss of liberty. The two others are from 19th Century Romantic writers, Wordsworth and Mary Shelley, each of whom celebrates the natural state of man and laments its inevitable corruption and vice consequent to civilization’s influence.
The Collins quotation about Hume, then, one I think has been excerpted from her “interview” with Scholastic Vice President David Levithan, is probably the epigraph or one of the epigraphs which will open Sunrise on the Reaping and which certainly is in keeping with her lifelong reflections on the work of “Enlightenment thinkers and the state of nature debate.”
David Hume, oddly enough, made his fortune by writing an epic History of England in six volumes (1754-1762) that sold so well in Scotland and England that he was financially free to write what he wished the rest of his life without fear of forever falling into penury. It stretches from the invasion of Caesar to the English Civil War and is considered a Tory or conservative history of the country, though one that criticizes the corrosive effect of religion on the body politic throughout.
I suspect that Collins, though the darling of revolutionaries and activists among the political Left today, is actually skeptical of faction, especially of the most zealous partisans of Left and Right, both defensive and critical of the state’s claims of Authority over individual Liberty, and wary of propaganda from all sides. I very much look forward to seeing all the epigraphs to Sunrise and how the inspiring idea of “implicit submission” informs the story.
Which brings us to the second take-away of Collins’ comments about Sunrise, how she moved from her Hume-inspiration to making the story about a “deeper dive into the use of propaganda and the power of those who control the narrative.”
That follows naturally from both her study of “Enlightenment thinkers and the state of nature argument” and the “implicit submission” piece. She will be making an argument, it seems, that the “opinion” which makes the many submit to the few is shaped less by the authority of tradition per Hume than by the Cave’s Shadow Casters, the propaganda ministers of the state and corporate oligarchs, those represented by the powers holders and Gamesmakers in her Panem’s Capitol.
We saw in Ballad how the Hunger Games franchise had to be re-imagined to work its magic in shaping the minds and quelling the rebellious spirits in the Districts. We know from Catching Fire that this had not worked on Haymitch Abernathy, who in his Tribute interview made a point of dismissively calling the exercise “stupid” and then winning the Quell by not participating in its murderous focus except incidentally in order to explore the boundaries or parameters of the Arena. Expect Sunrise to be the struggle between Coriolanus Snow and Haymitch Abernathy about “controlling the narrative,” the punishment of Abernathy by Snow post Quell (almost certainly by the death of his true love, Lenore Dove), and maybe even the chrysalis of Abernathy and Donner-Undersee as conspirators in the Pearl Plot.
The third and last take-away from Collins’ pre-publication Sunrise comments is her “The question ‘Real or not real?’ seems more pressing to me every day.” I think you can go two ways with that.
First, you can see her making a connection with David Hume, whose epistemological work might be summarized as the skeptic’s insistent questioning of things accepted as demonstrated with a probing investigation of its ‘truth value,’ something very much akin to “Real or not real?”
Second, and where I’m leaning, Collins seems determined to highlight to her Young Adult audience that the world today is increasingly one of political and moral messaging meant to shape their individual and collective “opinion” towards “implicit submission” to the status quo. This is much less a call to the streets than, I think, an echoing of Rowling’s comment on the Open Book Tour in 2007 when asked if she had a message for her young readers said, “Don’t trust the media or the government!” Which is to say, think for yourself and don’t believe everything you think, especially if what you think conforms to the predominant message of the social media, government press release, and legacy news outlets.
Three asides before I get back to my re-reading of Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes:
- Check out what Elizabeth Baird-Hardy and I wrote about the first prequel in the throes of the Covid hysteria in 2020 (talk about a providential and meaningful backdrop to a book about the conflict between Authority and Liberty!) here, here, and here.
- Incredibly, one HogPro Reader mades the Collins-Hume connection 15 years ago! and
- Check out my post on ‘Rowling and the Scottish Enlightenment.’ I confess to being startled by the embrace of the so-called Enlightenment, one of the most ironically and inappropriate names of any historical period, by both Rowling and Collins, both of which authors embed profoundly traditional content in their work.
Tomorrow I hope to make a close reading of the short excerpt we have from Sunrise on the Reaping. See you then!
